Several years ago, we faced a mystery in our home. When my older children were 3 and 4 years old, all of our children’s books were getting ruined. The pages were wrinkled, folded and ripping. The books could not fit on the shelves because the damaged pages made each book take up twice as much shelf space as it should have. We were forced to throw the kids’ favorite books in the garbage because they were unreadable. I saw it as a crisis of responsibility. How could our children be so careless with their possessions?
The minister was giving a sermon on “total giving.” When it came time to take up the offering, the plate came to a pew where there was a very small boy. He looked up at the usher and said, “Could you lower the plate?” Thinking that he wanted to see into the plate, the usher held it down a bit. “No,” said the boy, “a little lower, please.” The usher lowered it a bit more. “More; could you just put it on the floor?” the boy asked. The usher was aghast but finally put it on the floor. The boy stepped into it, stood there, and said, “This is what I give to the Lord.” — A Stewardship Scrapbook
On the day PC(USA) member Francis Ntowe’s sister was buried, there were six other funerals in her small community in Cameroon. “One of them was a pastor, and all of them had died from HIV/AIDS,” he said. “Every single one.”
In a few weeks, many of us will make our way to a place we call home in observance of Thanksgiving, our most religiously secular and secularly religious holiday. Gathered around a table of plenty, we will partake and share, acknowledging God’s gracious bounty to all and giving thanks for it.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words at Glenville High School in Cleveland on April 26, 1967. Several things have happened that have had me mulling on this concept of “somebodiness” and how, 50 years later, MLK’s words here are still so strikingly relevant.
Loan Nguyen waited anxiously at the airport for the arrival of a Syrian family that had traveled 13 hours from Jordan. The family, displaced by war in Syria, had spent more than two years in a refugee camp, trying to find a new home. The couple and their two small children were entering a country they did not know, and they had no idea what to expect.
I can still remember my first encounter with an overt racist. I must have been 8 or 9, and my friend and I were in the back seat. Her mom was driving and started talking to me.
The neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have helped renew attention on issues of race and ethnicity. Have Presbyterians’ attitudes and involvement in these issues changed with the times?
For many years, neither Glen Sanders nor Robert Stubenbort knew they had similar passions. But once they found out they shared a love for bicycles, something special happened. Sanders and Stubenbort, members of Calvin Presbyterian Church in the western Pennsylvania town of Zelienople, are the backbone of a new Bikes Mission that culminated with close to 130 refurbished bicycles and tricycles being personally delivered to a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota in late June.
Many of us have heard that the United States’ form of government was influenced by the practices and beliefs of Presbyterians who crossed the ocean to find religious freedom. Even today, our local municipal meetings and sessions of Congress mirror what takes place in church meeting rooms around the country as elected ruling elders seek to lead each congregation. While we may understand how the church influenced the form of government, we may not always know how traditional Reformed theology has influenced the beliefs that are the bedrock of the Constitution.
